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Solutions — with a price tag — seen for Toronto Community Housing residents

At places like 220 Oak St., partnerships with local agencies and the province are helping vulnerable TCHC tenants build better communities.

Nearly 500 tenants live at 220 Oak St. with just 10 children under the age of 12 officially documented by TCHC. Small groups of tenants have made great efforts to support their tight-knit community, hosting breakfast clubs on the weekends and checking in on one another as they face the challenges of living in public housing. (Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star)

Surviving her fourth heart attack last year, the 69-year-old was deeply depressed and confined to the Toronto Community Housing highrise at the edge of Regent Park she calls home.

She credits a team of health and support workers — who have spent more than a year embedded in the building, trying to improve the quality of life there — with helping her recover.

“Since they’ve come here there’s a lot of improvement,” Fernandes said Tuesday. She’s beaming from her usual perch in the building’s community room during a now-weekly drop-in organized by the community agency, Cota. “I’m very good now. I don’t have so much problems.”

A report released Tuesday at city hall, suggesting reforms to how public housing is delivered, holds up Fernandes’ building, 220 Oak St., as a model for how to provide the direct help for vulnerable citizens that has been lacking for years. As the Star reported Tuesday, the sum of 29 recommendations contained the report, if implemented, would be the biggest change in governance since TCHC was formed in 2002.

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The building: 220 Oak St. was built in the early 1970s near the corner of Dundas and River Sts. Designed to be a seniors-only building, the mostly bachelor or single-bedroom units became a draw for tenants with significant health and social challenges concentrated on 27 floors. TCHC deemed it one of the most challenging buildings in its 2,200-property portfolio. (Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star)

The changes would include the breakup of the current Toronto Community Housing Corporation into a non-profit housing provider and a development arm, decentralization of management and focus on ground-level decision-making.

But the funding to make it all happen has yet to materialize. The city is now faced with implementing recommendations from Mayor John Tory’s housing task force without specific commitments from the federal or provincial government.

“We must take care of the 110,000 families who call TCHC buildings their home, we have to find a better way,” Tory said at a press conference Tuesday. But he said TCHC lacks the mandate or the money to be more than a landlord.

The report recommends TCHC expand its current partnerships with provincially funded Local Health Integration Networks, or LHINs, that work now in some “high needs” buildings.

One of those was 220 Oak, which began as a pilot project in December 2014 with a combination of Cota’s own funding and support from the Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network. In January 2015, the program secured stable base funding to continue.

The Star spent nine months reporting on 220 Oak St. The two-part series can be read here: Part 1Part 1 / Part 2 Part 2

Since it began, Cota’s executive director Paul Bruce said, the program has had a dramatic impact on both individual residents and the larger community.

The Star gets an in depth look into the reality of the Toronto Community Housing building from residents and staff.

The number of emergency calls to police for what is classified as a “emotionally disturbed person” — someone who might be having a mental health or other crisis — have been cut in half. Nearly 30 people at risk of future eviction because of serious hoarding have received help and stayed housed. Of those tenants currently working with Cota, 73 per cent are now connected to health services they need.

“That happens when you give people support that (they) need,” Bruce said, sitting in Cota’s office, which is embedded inside the building on the main floor. “We’re starting to see those things change.”

Though providing on-the-ground support is not a groundbreaking recommendation, he said TCHC and the province are now starting to recognize this kind of work as both beneficial to individual well-being and a big economic boost for government, due to reduced strain on already overloaded emergency health and safety services.

“The light bulb went on somewhere,” Bruce said, adding the province seems interested in the possibility of expanding the program’s work to a nearby building. “I’m quite optimistic.”

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care said the LHINs currently fund four such teams across the city. “An evaluation is currently underway to identify how to leverage this model going forward and improve the care we provide,” a statement read.

At city hall, TCHC board member Councillor Joe Cressy said the barrier to providing these kind of services has always been funding, given that investment from both the federal and provincial governments has been disappearing. That challenge hasn’t changed with the release of the task force’s report, he said.

“Of course it requires funding,” Cressy told reporters. “The mayor’s task force does not propose a solution to the financial model. In fact, it is reliant and dependent on other levels of government.”

Joakina Fernandes. (Marta Iwanek/Toronto Star)

Tory acknowledged the city now finds itself at a crossroads — saying he will push for the city to create an implementation plan starting this week while also continuing to advocate for federal and provincial funding.

“Help is on the way, I am confident about that,” Tory said, particularly optimistic about the federal Liberals making good on a promise to substantially fund housing repairs.

Tory said he believes the LHINs are critical to addressing the needs of the city’s most vulnerable. But he was less certain on whether funding would be forthcoming from the province.

“It’s a health problem, first and foremost,” he said.

At 220 Oak, Fernandes and her neighbours still face the kinds of challenges that still exist across the city — the perils of living in public housing that include crumbling infrastructure, rampant bedbugs and safety concerns.

But just a day earlier, when she called, two of the Cota workers who spend six days a week at the building in shifts came to solve her current crisis. She was shivering in her poorly heated apartment on the 17th floor. The pair suspended a blanket over the badly insulated windows in the absence of curtains. She knows that kind of help isn’t available for everyone.

“Who’s doing (that) nowadays?” she asks. “No one is doing (anything) like that.”

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